Category Archives: oa.stem

‘Replacing Academic Journals’ | Jeff Pooley

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[…]

There’s lots to unpack in the Brembsian alternative proposed here. One cornerstone is the adoption of open standards that—as best I understand it—would enable university repositories and nonprofit, community-led platforms like Open Library of Humanities (OLH) to form a kind of global, interoperable library. A second cornerstone is a regulated market for services. In an open procurement process, publishers and other firms—nonprofit or otherwise—would submit bids for peer review services, for example, or for copy editing or even writing software. The idea is that a regulated marketplace will, through competition enabled by open standards, discipline the overall system’s cost.

It’s a fascinating proposal, one that—as the paper notes—could be implemented with existing technologies. The problem is the lever of change. The incumbent publishers’ entrenched position, Brembs et al explain, renders a first move by libraries or scholars impractical. That leaves funders, whose updated rules and review criteria could, the paper argues, tip the incentive structure in the direction of an open, journal-free alternative.

[…]

 

Arcadia Fund supports Plazi in its endeavor to rediscover known biodiversity | 16/05/2022

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“The Swiss-based Plazi NGO has received a grant of EUR 1.5 million from Arcadia Fund– a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – to further develop its Biodiversity Literature Repository(BLR) established in collaboration with Zenodo, the open science repository hosted and managed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and the open-access scholarly publisher and technology provider Pensoft. The Arcadia-supported project helps rediscover known biodiversity by liberating taxonomic treatments, material citations and images trapped in scholarly biodiversity publications, and making them FAIR and open. The project engages the community in the huge and decisive challenge to understand and preserve the biodiversity of our planet. Our knowledge about biodiversity is largely imprisoned in a corpus of more than 500 million pages of scientific research publications that is growing daily. Many of these publications are only available in print, and others are PDFs behind a paywall. These data are not FAIR; they are not findable, accessible, interoperable, or reusable. They cannot be linked to new digital resources such as gene sequences, citizen science observations, taxonomic names, or specimens of digitized natural history collections. Extracting and using text and data from such PDFs comes at very high cost, if possible at all. Through itsTreatmentBank production service, Plazi is a leader in providing access to biodiversity data liberated from publications. Thanks to the Arcadia Fund support and in collaboration with Pensoft, Zenodo and the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics Literature Services (SIBiLS), Plazi provides access to over 750,000 taxonomic treatments, 450,000 figures and over 1.1 million material citations from over 53,000 publications in the BLR….”

Factors Associated with Open Access Publishing Costs in Oncology Journals

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Background Open access (OA) publishing represents an exciting opportunity to facilitate dissemination of scientific information to global audiences. However, OA publication is often associated with significant article processing charges (APCs) for authors, which may thus serve as a barrier to publication.

Methods We identified oncology journals using the SCImago Journal & Country Rank database. All journals with an OA publication option and APC data openly available were included. We searched journal websites and tabulated journal characteristics, including APC amount (USD), OA model (hybrid vs full), 2-year impact factor (IF), H-index, number of citable documents, modality/treatment specific (if applicable), and continent of origin. We generated a multiple regression model to identify journal characteristics independently associated with OA APC amount.

Results Of 367 oncology journals screened, 251 met final inclusion criteria. The median APC was 2957 USD (IQR 1958-3450). On univariable testing, journals with greater number of citable documents (p<0.001), higher IF (p < 0.001), higher H-index (p < 0.001), and those using the hybrid OA model (p < 0.001) or originating in Europe/North America (p < 0.001) tended to have higher APCs. In our multivariable model, number of citable documents, IF, OA publishing model, and region persisted as significant predictors of processing charges.

Conclusions OA publication costs are greater in oncology journals that publish more citable articles, utilize the hybrid OA model, have higher IF, and are based in North America or Europe. These findings may inform targeted action to help the oncology community fully appreciate the benefits of open science.

 

Aligning the Research Library to Organizational Strategy – Ithaka S+R

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“Open access has matured significantly in recent years. The UK and EU countries have committed largely to a “gold” version of open access, driven largely by transformative agreements with the major incumbent publishing houses.[14] The US policy environment has been far more mixed, with a great deal of “green” open access incentivized by major scientific funders, although some individual universities pursued transformative agreements. Both Canadian and US libraries have benefitted from the expansion of free and open access in strengthening their position at the negotiating table with major publishers.[15]

Progress on open access has radically expanded public access to the research literature. It has also brought with it a number of second-order effects. Some of them are connected to the serious problems in research integrity and the growing crisis of trust in science.[16] Others can be seen in the impacts on the scholarly publishing marketplace and the platforms that support discovery and access.[17]

While open access has made scientific materials more widely available, it has not directly addressed the challenges in translating scholarship for public consumption. Looking ahead, it is likely that scholarly communication will experience further changes as a result of computers increasingly supplanting human readership. The form of the scientific output may decreasingly look like the traditional journal article as over time standardized data, methods, protocols, and other scientific artifacts become vital for computational consumption….”

Successful implementation of Open Access strategies at Universities of Science & Technology

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“While the CWTS Leiden ranking has been available since 2011/2012, it is only in 2019 that a first attempt was made at ranking institutions by Open Access-related indicators. This was due to the arrival of Unpaywall as a tool to measure openly available institutional research outputs – either via the Green or the Gold OA routes – for a specific institution.

The CWTS Leiden ranking by percentage of the institutional research output published Open Access effectively meant the first opportunity for institutions worldwide to be ranked by the depth of their Open Access implementation strategies brushing aside aspects like their size. This provided an interesting way to map the progress of CESAER Member institutions that were part of the Task Force Open Science 2020-2021 Open Access Working Group (OAWG) towards the objective stated by Plan S of achieving 100% Open Access of research outputs.

The OAWG then set out to map the situation of the Member institutions represented in it on this Open Access ranking and to track their evolution on subsequent editions of this ranking. The idea behind this analysis was not so much to introduce an element of competition across institutions but to explore whether progress was taking place in the percentage of openly available institutional research outputs year on year.

The results of this analysis – shown in figures within this paper for the 2019, 2020 and 2021 editions – show strong differences across Member institutions that are part of the OAWG. From internal discussions within the group, it became evident that these differences could be explained through a number of factors that contributed to a successful Open Access implementation at an institutional level. This provided the basis for this work.

The document identifies four key factors that contribute to a successful OA implementation at institutions, and hence to achieving a good position on the CWTS Leiden ranking for Open Access. These factors are:

• Open Access policies. This aspect is highlighted as the key driver for a successful OA implementation: high-ranked institutions typically implement strong OA policies, whereas low-ranked ones often lack a specific policy beyond the (common) one issued by the European Commission for its framework programmes.

• Institutional system configuration (repositories and/or current research information system (CRIS) systems). The way institutional systems support OA implementation are configured is also a critical element for a high ranking. High-ranked institutions within the OAWG often have an interconnected institutional repository and a CRIS. Other institutions only operate a repository and some have neither.

• Institutional research support staff. A strong OA policy and an adequately configured set of institutional systems may not be enough to guarantee a successful OA implementation if the research support staff behind such work is not numerous or well-trained enough.

• Open Access advocacy strategies. One of the key areas of activity for such staff is the communication with researchers to highlight the relevance of Open Access implementation at a given institution and to provide the required support workflows….”

NYU Faculty Cluster Hiring Initiative: Building STEM for the Public Good: Cultivating Openness in the Sciences

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“Primary School: Division of Libraries

Participating Departments/Units

Business and Government Information Services
Data Services
Scholarly Communications & Information Policy
Science Services

Apply via Interfolio

STEM Librarian
Librarian for Open Innovation …”

A Call to Diversify the Lingua Franca of Academic STEM Communities

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“Executive Summary: The current bias in the STEM academy favors English-language research publications, creating a barrier between English-speaking and non-English speaking researchers that is detrimental to the continuity and evolution of STEM research. In this paper, we lay out policy measures that employ U.S. government resources to create infrastructure that standardizes and facilitates the language translation process and hosting of multilingual publications. This proposal aims to increase linguistic diversity in academic STEM publications for the ultimate goal of improving global scientific communication and ameliorating the existing disparity between English and non-English STEM literature.”

 

Updated PMC Launching Soon!

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In the coming weeks, we will be launching an updated PMC website with a modern design. You can try the updated version on PMC Labs now, and it will become the default design of the PMC website following launch. Be sure to check the banner at the top of the PMC website for updates on an exact cutover date.

Updated PMC Launching Soon!

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In the coming weeks, we will be launching an updated PMC website with a modern design. You can try the updated version on PMC Labs now, and it will become the default design of the PMC website following launch. Be sure to check the banner at the top of the PMC website for updates on an exact cutover date.

The New Clarivate Science: A Second-Order Consequence of Open Access – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Open access (OA) is in the process of transforming STEM publishing, even if today the progress towards open access is unevenly distributed by geography. STEM publishing is shifting rapidly beyond a content licensing business. Beyond the Gold OA businesses that many are developing, several major publishers are seeing the opportunity to develop a services business of one sort or another.  

A number of major firms, not all of them primary publishers, are working to develop user workflow and research management and analytics services. These categories of platform services are far simpler to offer in an open environment than was previously the case. Some such services are offered to individual scholars, labs, or departments. Others are provided through the library, the university research office, or the information division. These university-wide channels suggest the opportunity for enterprise sales. …

On its own, Clarivate’s Science business has had an extraordinarily strong brand with Journal Impact Factor and Web of Science, but it has not had enterprise level reach within most universities, not least because of its comparative weakness in the humanities. 

 

ProQuest brings two major businesses, one that provides enterprise software principally, but not exclusively, to academic libraries, which operates under the Ex Libris brand, and one that provides principally humanities and social sciences (HSS) and primary source content to academic libraries, operating as ProQuest. It also has a set of businesses focused on public and K12 libraries, which are less relevant to the acquisition. ProQuest faces stronger competition in the academic content business (especially through EBSCO) than in the enterprise software business, where it has established an extremely robust foundation through its Alma library systems platform, overseen by a best in class technology product organization….

Observers have noted that, post-acquisition, Clarivate still does not have a primary publishing business, nor does it directly provide STEM content. But in an environment increasingly characterized by open access and syndication, especially for STEM, this will matter far less. Indeed, it might even come to be a financial benefit not to be saddled with a STEM publishing division….

For the past decade, Elsevier has been amassing a tools and analytics business that competes directly with major elements of Clarivate’s portfolio, building Scopus and associated impact metrics, acquiring and developing Pure and Mendeley, and more recently acquiring Aries, to take a few key examples. With its enlarged portfolio, Clarivate is positioned to compete effectively with Elsevier — minus the STEM primary publishing….”

A study of the roles of metadata standard and data repository in science, technology, engineering and mathematics researchers’ data reuse | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This research investigates how the availabilities of both metadata standards and data repositories influence researchers’ data reuse intentions either directly or indirectly as mediated by the norms of data reuse and their attitudes toward data reuse.

Design/methodology/approach

The theory of planned behavior (TPB) was employed to develop the research model of researchers’ data reuse intentions, focusing on the roles of metadata standards, data repositories and norms of data reuse. The proposed research model was evaluated using the structural equation modeling (SEM) method based on the survey responses received from 811 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) researchers in the United States.

Findings

This research found that the availabilities of both metadata standards and data repositories significantly affect STEM researchers’ norm of data reuse, which influences their data reuse intentions as mediated by their attitudes toward data reuse. This research also found that both the availability of data repositories and the norm of data reuse have a direct influence on data reuse intentions and that norm of data reuse significantly increases the effect of attitude toward data reuse on data reuse intention as a moderator.

Research limitations/implications

The modified model of TPB provides a new perspective in apprehending the roles of resource facilitating conditions such as the availabilities of metadata standards and data repositories in an individual’s attitude, norm and their behavioral intention to conduct a certain behavior.

Practical implications

This study suggests that scientific communities need to develop more supportive metadata standards and data repositories by considering their roles in enhancing the community norm of data reuse, which eventually lead to data reuse behaviors.

Originality/value

This study sheds light on the mechanism of metadata standard and data repository in researchers’ data reuse behaviors through their community norm of data reuse; this can help scientific communities and academic institutions to better support researchers in their data sharing and reuse behaviors.

Digital sequence information: free access is crucial | Leibniz Institut DSMZ

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Global problems such as the extinction of species and the decline of biological diversity, climate change, pandemics and hunger can only be solved with free access to digital sequence information”, states Prof. Jörg Overmann PhD, Scientific Director of the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures. “Without free access to digital sequence information [DSI], research on a national, European or international level will simply fail to work. Digital sequence information must be preserved as common good”, stresses Prof Overmann. 

“STEM Abstracting and Indexing (A&I) Tool Overlap Analysis” by Joshua Borycz, Alexander J. Carroll et al.

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Abstract:  Objectives: Compare journal coverage of abstract and indexing tools commonly used within academic science and engineering research.

Methods: Title lists of Compendex, Inspec, Reaxys, SciFinder, and Web of Science were provided by their respective publishers. These lists were imported into Excel and the overlap of the ISSN/EISSNs and journal titles was determined using the VLOOKUP command, which determines if the value in one cell can be found in a column of other cells.

Results: There is substantial overlap between the Web of Science’s Science Citation Index Expanded and the Emerging Sources Citation Index, the largest database with 17,014 titles, and Compendex (63.6%), Inspec (71.0%), Reaxys (67.0%), and SciFinder (75.8%). SciFinder also overlaps heavily with Reaxys (75.9%). Web of Science and Compendex combined contain 77.6% of the titles within Inspec.

Conclusion: Flat or decreasing library budgets combined with increasing journal prices result in an unsustainable system that will require a calculated allocation of resources at many institutions. The overlap of commonly indexed journals among abstracting and indexing tools could serve as one way to determine how these resources should be allocated.

|| Advancing Open Science in transport research: the BE OPEN project draws to a close | UITP ||

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To support the implementation of Open Science in the transport domain, the EU-project BE OPEN was launched in January 2019. Coordinated by Greek research institute CERTH, the project included 17 partners from across Europe. In BE OPEN UITP’s role was key in ensuring that the public transport and practitioners’ perspective was well integrated in the project and its deliverables.